Talks for Sudan’s Darfur bog down as Khartoum refuses observers: rebels
LIBREVILLE, April 6 (AFP) — Attempts by mediators in Chad to organise direct talks between rebels from Sudan’s western Darfur region and the government have bogged down over Khartoum’s refusal to allow international observers to attend the negotiations, a rebel chief said Tuesday.
“There is nothing new. We are still at the same point. The government still refuses to meet in the presence of the international community,” the leader of the delegation representing the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (MJE), Abubker Hamid Nour, told AFP by telephone from the Chadian capital Ndjamena.
“We will never hold discussions without the presence of the international community. The international community bearing witness to the talks is very important to us,” he said.
The rebels want international observers to attend talks between themselves and the Sudanese government because, according to Hamid Nour, Khartoum failed to uphold its end of a deal reached at earlier negotiations with the rebels at which no international observers were present.
“We are ready for a ceasefire but the government doesn’t want to talk,” said the rebel chief.
On Monday, representatives of the rebels and the Sudanese government held separate meetings at Chad’s foreign ministry with the country’s president, Idriss Deby.
Deby’s government is trying to mediate an end to the conflict, which is thought to have killed more than 10,000 people in just over a year.
An estimated 670,000 people have also been forced from their homes, many seeking refuge in neighbouring Chad.
Representatives of the Khartoum government have accepted a plan put forward on Saturday by the Chadian mediators as the basis for negotiating an end to the Darfur conflict.
The Chadian plan proposes a ceasefire, guarantees for the safety of the civilian population and measures to resolve the humanitarian crisis, a Chadian official said on condition of anonymity.
The conflict in Darfur, western Sudan, began in February 2003 and intensified just as Khartoum and the country’s main rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, started finalising a deal to end Sudan’s wider civil war, which began in 1983.
United Nations officials say the Darfur conflict is now the “world’s greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe.”
A United Nations mission began a probe Tuesday into allegations of widespread atrocities by government-backed militias in Darfur, a spokeswoman said.
“The technical fact-finding mission on the human rights situation in Darfur is starting today,” said Annick Stevenson, a spokeswoman for the United Nations at its European headquarters in Geneva.
“The mission will start in Chad and will interview refugees from Darfur, and will visit Sudan later,” she said in a note.
But Stevenson later told AFP that the mission had not been given the green light yet by Khartoum, and the UN was continuing negotiations to try to gain access to western Sudan.